Some of the music here is great, other stuff interesting new to me stuff, and some others are boring, redundant, and I guess I won't review 'em now, or probably ever. I have enjoyed learning some new music - I have 14,493 songs now ripped to Google Play and I'm heading to the free limit of 20,000. Been fun to get all the Beatles cds from the library, or borrow buddy's 9 disc Miles on Prestige, 12 disc Miles on Columbia, Beethoven's symphonies on original instruments and so forth.

But here in it's entirety, is Love's Forever Changes, the acknowledged #1 of psychedelic 60s music, at least amongst us people who were eating acid 45 years ago and paying (probably too much) attention to pop music (Dead! Doors! Moby Grape! Quicksilver! Mike Bloomfield! Canned Heat!). It seemed way more important then. I'd grown up hearing Chuck Berry, Elvis, Little Richard, Everly Brothers etc - we'd stay up to 9PM to hear Uncle Tom's rock show on KGU, Honolulu, lying in our bunkbed in Pearl City, I was 7 and my brother, 9, got a transistor radio! We were tuned in and before too many years went by, turned on. We were into the first protest songs and early Dylan; it was all part of the civil rights movement, anti-war stuff, hippies and what we called The Movement. Hmmm, seems a little ancient, and even a little quaint - I never imagined we'd have Cheney or endless war, and that hippies would turn into wearing hippie uniforms.

But this was the seminal psychedelic album of it's day, still one of my (and my family's and friends) faves and is well worth ripping. Love was a multi-racial, multi-ethnic LA band, more popular than the Doors in the early days; now a truly underground band that hardly gets mentioned outside a certain genre. Odd, because the Doors sell more albums than when Morrison was alive and these guys are mostly forgotten. Arthur Lee, main guy (though they had various strong writers and musicians) ended up drugging bad, then prison, then cleaned up and spent the last decade of his life touring Europe - a lot of that is on youtube, and while good stuff, doesn't compare to when he had the amazing drummer George Suranovich, or Fayad on bass, or lead guitar Johnny Echols (who also played with Hendrix), song writer Bryan MacLean and others. The Euro stuff is him with a backup band, good but not Love.

In 2005, the association of European disc jockeys voted Forever Changes the number one rock album of all time. #11 on Virgin's All-Time Top 1000 Albums, #40 on Rolling Stone Magazine's list of the top 500 albums of all time - so I guess SOME people dig 'em.

Last edited by patfromlogan; 8/02/2012 12:40am at .

"Preparing mentally, the most important thing is, if you aren't doing it for the love of it, then don't do it." - Benny Urquidez